A career fighting for integration, civil rights

Last week, as part of its Windows on the World (WOW) lecture series, the West Chop Club hosted a full house for a talk by storied civil rights attorney and law professor John Brittain. 

Brittain pushed for integration in public schools and higher education across the country over his remarkable career, and he also mentored generations of civil rights attorneys.

Though a longtime Vineyard visitor, the invitation for him to speak on the Island stemmed from his son Karim Brittain, a highly regarded personal fitness trainer.

The timing was fortuitous, John Brittain said, as only a few months before, he had been presented with the D.C. Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Award for his “lifelong commitment to advancing civil rights” and for his work as a professor. He had also just finished writing his autobiography during a sabbatical.

Currently a professor, and Dean Emeritus, at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, Brittain also spent 22 years on the faculty of the University of Connecticut School of Law — the first African American to do so — as well as the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern, a historically Black university. At the same time, his career has been the embodiment of the guiding words of his law school mentor, Herbert O. Reid (1946–91): “Keep one foot in the classroom teaching in the law school, and the other foot in the courtroom litigating civil rights cases.” 

Taking the podium after an introduction by WOW committee member Margaret Rietano, Brittain began his talk with tales of his own life journey, living on the estate of a wealthy family outside Westport, Conn., until the age of 5 — his mother the maid and his father the butler, chauffeur, and pilot – then living in an all-white neighborhood in Norwalk during the 1950s and early 1960s, and being the only Black student at his schools growing up. 

“I didn’t experience Jim Crow like they did in the South, but I experienced integration in my own way,” he told the audience. He reflected on being the captain and highest scorer of the ice hockey club, and receiving recruitment offers from various colleges. In the end, though, he attended the historically Black college Howard University, “because my big sister — herself a Howard graduate — said so.” He would go on to Howard’s law school, receiving his degree in 1969. 

Three months into his career as a lawyer, and 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education, Brittain found himself in Oxford and then Jackson, Miss., litigating desegregation and other civil rights cases. He spoke about being advised to get a gun by other Black men around him, and, responding later to a question from the audience about the fear he felt during that time, he described a chilling incident when he was glad that he had come to carry that gun habitually in his briefcase, or tucked in his belt when walking down the street. 

Brittain eventually returned to Connecticut to follow the path encouraged by his mentor, and teach at the UConn Law School, located in Hartford. It was there that his experience in Mississippi manifested itself once again. After working on desegregation cases in the South, he couldn’t help but notice how segregated the schools were in the Northern state’s capital.

His studies resulted in a lawsuit, Sheff vs O’Neill, for which he served as lead counsel. Thirteen years after he began, the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered the state to take the steps necessary to integrate the schools in Hartford. As Brittain noted at Wednesday’s talk, however, and like so many places in the country, there is still much work to be done to achieve the mandates of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The final landmark case he discussed was a federal case against Maryland that was settled in 2021. The case was pushing for “comparable and competitive opportunities” — a recurring theme — at Maryland’s four HBCUs. After 15 years of fighting and Brittain serving as co-counsel, the plaintiffs settled for $577 million.

Brittain concluded his remarks with a favorite quote by African writer Amilcar Cabral: “Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.” With that, Brittan invited questions that included queries from the audience about the state of the Supreme Court, the Constitution as a “living document,” and “What is the biggest threat to democracy?” Each in its own way prompted an animated response about the importance of shaping a new, promising generation of lawyers and the challenges facing those who will teach them in today’s climate, especially international law and First Amendment issues. Brittain-the-professor emphasized the need for a “healthy learning process for law students now and the future, to maintain the ability to learn and express themselves without concern.”

In the midst of the Q and A, though, a young woman asked Brittain who his role models were. The answer? Thurgood Marshall, Supreme Court Justice from 1967 to 1991: that’s who he admired most throughout his career, and, not coincidentally, the namesake of the law school at Texas Southern, where he had served as dean from 1999 to 2002. How fitting that he received an award granted in Marshall’s honor, that he has made a career of fighting in favor of civil rights, and that he continues to captivate admiring audiences wherever he goes. Two days after his talk at the West Chop Club, in fact, he was in New Orleans to address the 16th annual Conclave on Diversity in the Legal Profession, sponsored by the Louisiana Bar Association.